Asprin, Robert Lynn – Catwoman – Tiger Hunt (With Lynn Abbey)

Bruce Wayne filled his mouth with coffee. It tasted burnt and sweet, with the texture of crankcase oil mixed with sand. The youngest Gagauzi stifled a smirk. And Bruce remembered the Gagauzi were ethnic Turks with whom coffee was an art, not a wake-up beverage. He gulped heroically and set the cup on the floor to precipitate.

“He wants to talk to you,” Tiger said to Bruce after several minutes of apparently futile discussion. “Tell him he’s got to do it my way.”

“What is your way?” Bruce asked, getting cautiously to his feet.

“We meet day after tomorrow, midnight, Pier 23. We go out to sea. I give ’em what their pictures bought, we radio the freighter and put them and the merchandise on board. An’ I never see their friggin’ faces again.”

Bruce nodded and began lobbying Khalki with words and gestures, just as Tiger had. The Gagauzi relented; he wanted to go home with whatever he could salvage from his nightmare. But before he led Tiger and Bruce Wayne back to the ladder, he rooted through his meager possessions and came up with a small enamel pin of a gray wolf on a red field.

“Gagauz flag,” he said proudly as he affixed it to Bruce Wayne’s shirt. Then he executed a military salute. “Hero.”

All the way out of the firetrap, Bruce Wayne reminded himself what the Connection was doing was not right and what he was about to do was not betrayal.

It wasn’t hard for Bruce to get away from Tiger for a few minutes. He crouched in a doorway and wrote a message to Alfred. He told the butler to contact Commissioner Gordon with the where and when of the arms. He paused and looked around; Tiger was nowhere to be seen. He turned the paper over and added a second message: